ARTIST STATEMENT
Across my recent body of work, I explore resilience as both spiritual transmission and material cultivation. In The Winged Messenger, seed beads applied through the Huichol wax technique transform an antique shoe form into a vessel of divine communication — resilience as message carried across obstacles. Together, these works examine how what is seeded — whether intuition, labor, or ancestral memory — attaches, layers, and hardens into structure. Resilience, in my practice, is not passive endurance but active formation: a message received, a reef built, a lineage sustained.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Courtney Nzeribe is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago, working across fiber, painting, printmaking, and mixed media. Her practice explores diasporic memory, feminine autonomy, spirituality, and material storytelling through tactile processes such as felting, beading, embroidery, and print. Through layered, labor-intensive techniques, she investigates resilience as both spiritual transmission and embodied inheritance — what is seeded through intuition, labor, and ancestral memory, and how it hardens into form.
Her recent body of work considers resilience as cultivation and communication. Sculptural and devotional forms draw on myth, oceanic histories, and diasporic lineages, examining how fragile beginnings — whether seed beads, oyster spats/seeds, or whispered messages — accumulate into structure, industry, and survival.
Her work has been exhibited at Woman Made Gallery, Bridgeport Art Center, Zhou B Art Center, Art Barn (Valparaiso, IN), and in multiple curated exhibitions throughout Chicago. Recent exhibitions include The Mystical, The Magical, The Macabre (2025), Faceted Fiber (2025), and Through a BIPOC Lens: Decolonizing Feminism (2024). She is a board member of Woman Made Gallery.
Nzeribe studied at Parsons Paris at The American University in Paris and has been published in Gastronomica (University of California Press) and other literary and culinary journals.
© Courtney Nzeribe